The new technology seems to have great potential. The actual liquid metal alloy in question is a a cocktail of gallium and indium with a dash of tin. It flows freely at temperatures as low as 10 degrees centigrade. The exotic material's thermal conductivity, an astounding 65 times that of water (1600 times better than air), means it should be able to whisk heat away from hot graphics chips instantly.

The metal is then pumped through tubes, similar to water cooling systems, and the heat dissipated via a radiator at one end of the card. There's another remarkably cool thing about it: because it's a metal, it can be pumped around the loop magnetically – so the pump has no moving parts, and is silent.

What Intel and AMD need to do is to incorporate this type of techology into the processor internally; the result will be self-cooled processor - like an internal combusion engine where coolant runs inside the engine NOT outside to acheive the best thermal transfer rate.

From what I understand, at least part of the problem is this: although liquid metal might be better than anything else at sucking heat away from a hot chip, that heat doesn't magically disappear. The heat is still inside the cooling system, and must be somehow removed from the liquid metal before the coolant carries the heat back to the chip. The only way to do this is by transferring the heat to the air. And that, of course, is the same problem that old fashioned air cooling systems have. Effectively, the heat has been moved a few centimetres away from the chip, which is certainly an improvement, but it hasn't actually gone away.